After a fire nearly destroyed their home, a Dallas couple found an opportunity to realize their green ambitions

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In the 15 years they'd lived in their home, Julie Cohn and Dave Rolston had compiled a long wish list of the renovations they hoped to undertake—someday. They'd tackled a few of the top priorities as time and money allowed, adding an office one year, replacing the roof the next, eventually upgrading the master bath, but the big overhaul seemed years away. Then the fire happened.

Cohn, sick with the flu, woke up in the middle of the night, flipped the bathroom light switch and heard a crackle of electricity overhead. Within minutes, smoke detectors were screaming. She and Rolston hustled their young daughter, Mila, out of their home and called the fire department. Though the house never burst into flames (thanks largely to the metal roof they had added), by morning it was clear that the entire structure had suffered extensive smoke and water damage.

But out of adversity came opportunity. After sorting through insurance considerations, Cohn and Rolston took on the challenge of making their wish list a reality.

They decided to rebuild in nearly the exact footprint of the original house, an inherently green decision that was to be the first in a series of earth-friendly choices they made. "My husband is a conservation nut and always has been, since way before green was stylish," says Cohn. Though insurance restrictions would mean they still faced time and money issues, increasing their home's efficiency was high on their list. They made it a priority, she adds, to find "affordable choices that were conservation conscious."

The couple considered the property's best feature to be the backyard: nearly an acre of land that Rolston, a landscape architect, had thoughtfully planted and tended through the years. The house was fairly nondescript, a 1949 brick two-story, and their main complaint had always been its lack of connection to the outdoors. This time around, they planned to unify the two. "Our goal was to give every room a relationship with the garden," says Cohn, a product designer who credits their backyard as a source of inspiration for her textiles and wall coverings.

With assistance from an architect friend, James Manning, they revised the compartmentalized entry and living and dining rooms into an open area with just a single partial wall between them. Focusing attention on the view, they replaced the windows with bigger, better ones—low E, argon-filled, with operable panes for air circulation. On the other hand, they did away with a pair of living room windows that flanked the fireplace, because the duo had a low-efficiency, western exposure and faced a fence.

"Maximizing the windows on the south gave us a solar heat gain in the winter," says Rolston. "And one dramatic view instead of a couple of so-so ones," Cohn adds.

While higher ceilings had been a wish-list priority, the existing second story limited them to eight feet. But the expansive windows they chose made the rooms feel more airy. And in the living area, they splurged and lowered the floor by taking in some of the crawl space, gaining an extra two feet.

Because the couple loved their backyard, the screened porch that opened onto it had long been their favorite room. The space, however, had always felt like the glorified patio it was, with a small door and steps leading down from the kitchen, a low ceiling and a flat roof above it that Mila's bedroom overlooked.

Another top-of-the-wish-list contender had been to turn the porch into a screened-in extension of the house, which they now did by enlarging the doorway and raising the ceiling and floor to match the level of the adjacent kitchen and dining areas. They added a pocket door with glass panels, which can slide shut as weather dictates. Otherwise, both breezes and people can flow freely between the spaces.

To moderate the temperature of the porch and the living areas, they employed a few naturally green ideas that Rolston calls "good, basic principles for keeping places cool in summer and warm in winter." They started with flooring, using a dark porcelain tile that feels good underfoot in the summer and radiates heat when warmed by the winter sun.

Next, they shaded the screen panels and windows with a custommade steel and cedar arbor, onto which they trained fast-growing vines for softness and shade. For extremely sunny days, they mounted solar blocking shades on the outside of the windows. And on the flat roof above the refurbished screened porch, Rolston
planted sod, which both cools the space below and gives Mila a lawn to play on just outside her bedroom window.

We always wanted to modernize the house and take off the details," says Cohn. "They were basic things we talked about—simplify the rooms, raise the ceilings and add wood to make it feel warmer." That's just what they did in the upstairs bedrooms, streamlining the layout, pitching the ceiling into unused attic space and enlarging the windows so they matched the rest of the house. A few years before, when Cohn's home office was added, they had used rift-sawn white oak for the cabinetry. Now, for consistency, they used the same wood on cabinets in the master bathroom and kitchen and on a wall surrounding the fireplace.

"I don't like a pupu platter of materials," says Cohn, who opted for a palette of gray limestone for the counters and fireplace surround, mixed with the golden-colored wood.

With a two-story house, their second-floor bedrooms had always suffered the most from the Texas heat, and as part of the redo they added a radiant foil heat reflector to the roof rafters to help keep the upper portions of their home cooler. Between all their modifications and the installation of more efficient heating and cooling systems, appliances and insulation, Rolston estimates that they've reduced their energy consumption by more than 25 percent.

The family has been settled in the remade house for a year now, with no new wish list to speak of. "We're grateful to be here," says Cohn, "and to have been able to customize our home to fit our family and the way we live."

What the Pros Know

Sod and other types of green roofs are gaining in popularity, a trend landscape architect Dave Rolston applauds. "If done properly, the grass and soil create a layer of insulation that both moderates the temperature in the space below and protects the roof," he says. "And, in our case, it made for a much more attractive view." Rolston says proper installation of the sod is critical, with good drainage essential for preventing leaks. He had a roofing company install a waterproof continuousmembrane
covering over a sloped plywood frame; then he added a drainage mat (through Hanes Geo Components, HanesGeo.com) designed to channel water to metal scuppers and down to the garden. He topped the mat with six inches of lightweight soil, a custom mix for roofing uses, and then planted Zoysia 'Emerald' grass. "It has a beautiful, fine texture and is very drought and heat tolerant," he says. "Plus, it grows only six to eight inches tall, so it doesn't have to be mown."